Week 3 - Academic Misconducts

Week 3 – Academic Misconducts

This week’s lecture was about the nature of Academic Misconducts, and more specifically about cheating, plagiarism and collusion.

For starters, we were introduced to the penalties of such actions and it was apparent to use that no matter what one might gain from plagiarism and/or cheating the risk is much higher than the gain. Also a fine point made by the tutor was that during our Academic studies in the university we should strive to have the most proper mentality and to be ethical, since this will affect our ongoing lives in a degree.

After this introduction, we talked about some things to keep in mind in order to avoid these misconducts. More specifically:

- During examinations we must be 100% sure that we use only authorized material and even if there is a case where we are not sure of what is authorized and what is not, then we should ask the invigilator for advice. Better safe than sorry I might say!
- About Collusion, we should be extremely careful when reading an assessment’s guideline and we should also take care to whom we lend our essays/notes. Also we should take care so that our essay is not available to certain people.
- In order to avoid Plagiarism, one should have at least a basic understanding of the use of references and about how to use bibliography.

The next part of the lecture, was a more in-depth discussion about Plagiarism, since it seems that Plagiarism is the most widespread Academic Misconduct in worldwide level. Plagiarism is the act of presenting words, ideas, images etc. as our own when they are not. The most “impressive” fact about Plagiarism is that around 30% of the students worldwide have used Plagiarism on every written assignment they undertook!

(www.plagiarism.com)

The next thing we talked about was the penalties of Plagiarism, and we were also given some real life examples that made us (at least me personally) to understand that Plagiarism is something not to be looked down upon even outside the university life.

Lastly, we were given some guidelines in order to avoid Plagiarism (intentional or unintentional even) such as: the usage of our own ideas and thoughts, giving credit for copied, adapted or paraphrased material, avoiding the use of other people’s work with only some cosmetic changes and to be aware of the “common knowledge”.

After the lecture was over, I must admit that todays theme was interesting, because it allowed me to become familiar with a term that ,unfortunately, was not very well known here in Greece. I will recite a fact about my earlier years during my studies in the Technological University of Athens, I remember a professor asking us to do a research about the evolution of Windows, and everyone was just copying paste information found around the Internet without any changes and without references. So I must admit wholeheartedly that todays lecture might be the most important one I had until this part.

G.

Week 2 - Reflective Writing

In this week the topic of the lecture was about “Reflective Writing” and we also had some more in-depth talk about the importance of PDP.

We learned about what is Reflective Practice beforehand and about Gibb’s Reflective Cycle before talking about Reflective Writing. Afterwards, we defined Reflective Writing as a process that : a) by the usage of reflective cycle and writing one becomes better at learning, b) its primary purpose is learning and c) gives a transformative nature in writing.

The next part of the lecture was about the distinction between essay writing and reflective writing. The main difference between these 2 categories was that essay writing is more likely to be 100% subjective while reflective writing not necessarily. 

In addition, we examined sentence structure for variety and the features of reflective writing, in order to become more apt in organizing our thoughts in text, to improve our creativity when writing, to train our analytical skills and to develop critical thinking. 

After this part, there was some in depth analysis about Prewriting (Invention). The Prewriting process was composed by 3 steps: 1) Analyze the title in order to explain and to show “how it differs from”,  2) do an analyze plan of the title and 3) to draw a mind map of the concepts.  We also become familiar with the six finger approach when mind mapping, a process that can summarize the meaning of the title of the essay by using six simple questions.

The last part of the lecture was about proper essay structure. A well made essay is composed by 3 parts, an introduction, the main body of the essay and the conclusion. The introduction part ideally should introduce the general topic of the essay and contain the writers thesis statement. When writing the main body paragraphs, the writer must keep in mind that the first sentence of each paragraph is always the most important one and that he should make proper use of supporting sentences. The concluding paragraph is the signal of the incoming end of the essay, it should remind to the reader the writers main subtopics in short and to leave the reader with your final thoughts on the essay topic.

That was the end of the lecture, and I must say that I found this lecture quite of note for many reasons. Mainly, I found the lecture interesting not because I learned something (I was already familiar with almost everything discussed) but because it allowed me to point out some minor flaws that I had in reflective writing. I honestly hope that by organizing a bit more my reflective writing and eliminating the flaws I have to be able to write way better essays. Another thing, that I would like to mention is that one thing I also learned today is that no matter how good we are at something we can always improve and there is always ways to improve our knowledge on certain matters/topics.

G.